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Both ages as separate interviews, since his answers will be different and you will have to handle his responses differently. In the second interview, he can even look back and say "Yeah, I remember...
Sketch out both (or multiple) ideas as fully-fleshed plots from beginning to end. Get all your separate possibilities down on paper. Put everything aside for a week. Come back to them and re-read...
You can't do a montage in prose, anymore than you can paint a symphony or score a sunset. It is simply a technique of a different media. Each media has its own storytelling devices and you should n...
The answer to this and your other similar question is the same: Your Mileage May Vary. If you can get it to work, go for it. There's no rule about it one way or the other. In Susanna Clarke's Jon...
It depends on context. Why has the character's name never been mentioned? Why does no one know it? What label, nickname, or epithet are you using to describe the character instead? I would mentio...
There is no One True Way. Every writer is different. Even the same writer may have two different approaches to two different books (or series). JK Rowling plotted out the entire seven-book Harry P...
I just finished reading Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence which does almost exactly this, although over five books. The first book has three siblings as main characters, book 2 has one boy...
I'm not sure where we got the notion that readers have to identify with the main character. We are one of the most narcissistic societies of recent memory but we are still interested in people othe...
sure, why not? I think as long as there is some coherent structure behind the character so that you can establish that this person would behave in thus-and-such a way, and it's consistent and credi...
Welcome to the site, Chimere! As a general rule, it's best to stick with one protagonist. As @Private has mentioned, if you have two, it should generally be a hero and a heroine (please see the com...
Gary Gygax's Gord the Rogue series was allegedly an entire RPG campaign turned into a set of novels (which explains the ridiculous deus ex machina ending). If role-playing helps you to flesh out ...
It depends entirely on whether your voice is an interesting one. We all tend to believe our own voices are more interesting than they really are. Despite all the talk about expressing oneself, what...
You're being given a prompt, so that will do half the work for you. I think it was J. Michael Straczynski, writer of Bablyon 5, who wrote that one could sum up "conflict" in three questions: Wh...
You don't capitalize the dialogue tag she said or she laughed if it's attached to your dialogue. You would only capitalize She laughed if it's a new thought. So: "Do you know where we are going...
While I wouldn't consider "gerunds" (or even adverbs) to be mistakes, if you're worried about your grammar, hire an editor to do a line-edit. Explain (if this is the case) that you're happy with th...
I think "selected literary pieces or passages" is your linchpin here. Let's take that college mainstay, the Norton Anthology (this one is American Literature). This is a book which contains quote...
Yes, you can ask for feedback at any and all of those stages. The feedback which is helpful at any stage is "This works and here's why" and "This doesn't work and here's why." The "here's why" is...
As others have said, you need to make the bad decisions believable by the reader. The easiest way to do that is to make the hero struggle with terrible consequences for doing the right thing. An ...
Tell more stories. If you've built a world, put sentient beings in it and put conflicts in front of them. Let the world unfold in front of your characters, and let the characters talk about the o...
First of all, your protagonist almost must change, or there's not much point to your book. If s/he does not at some point stop running and pull him/herself together, your reader will feel like the ...
I'd say yes if you're careful about it and don't overdo it. Different formatting can be useful in quickly alerting the reader that the text is from an article or an email, particularly if it begins...
The word 'but' follows the same rules as any other conjunction, just like 'and' or 'or'. It's a word that joins two phrases. All of your examples are correct. The first phrase ends with a comma, ...
It is not grammatically correct, no. To be grammatically correct, you would use: "Why are you laughing?" However, if your hero speaks a certain way and it would be natural for him to ask the ques...
Some style guides consider contractions to be informal, and therefore would not be used in certain contexts. Beyond that, there's no grammatical restraint, either on they are vs. they're or the r...
I'm not going to tell you how to solve your problem. Quite frankly, I don't know how to solve your problem, despite having faced it countless times myself in the past. Instead, I'm going to show yo...
